


What Does It Matter?

by aban_asaara



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Angst, Blood Mage Hawke, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-10-08 11:36:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17385752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aban_asaara/pseuds/aban_asaara
Summary: After Hawke reveals herself as a blood mage during her duel against the Arishok, there isn’t much Donnic can do except pick up the pieces.





	What Does It Matter?

**Author's Note:**

> For the sweet anon who asked for my take on how Fenris would react to learning that Hawke is a blood mage. :D

They turn the body over, and lead pools into Donnic’s stomach when he recognises the face: guardsman Jenkins, staring haggard and vacant at the gray skies overhead, the blood from the gash on his head clumping his hair. Unarmed and out of armour, the young man had been caught off duty by the hell the Qunari unleashed upon the city just the previous night.

Donnic swallows back the unexpected grief surging in his throat. Now is not the time for mourning, so long as bodies and debris still litter the streets, but all of a sudden he wants to punch things and scream at the top of his lungs. Kirkwall is a right mess on a good day, but this? This is unbridled, undiscerning slaughter.

Next to him, Fenris waits without a word, his body taut.

“Sorry,” Donnic says, when he trusts himself not to start kicking the closest Qunari corpse. Fenris nods, and together they haul Jenkins’s rigid body on top of the others already heaped in the cart. A couple of the horned giants lie on the bottom, heavy enough on their own to set the wheels of the cart groaning, layered with the diminutive bodies of elves and humans. Mages for the most part, some of them still gangly adolescents who probably never cast a spell outside a lecture room before, only let out of their prison to repel the attack.

Donnic tries to close Jenkins’s eyes with two fingers, the way they do in Varric’s novels, but can’t: Jenkins fights to keep his eyelids open, as though part of him still refused to submit to death.

“Bloody hell,” Donnic mutters, suddenly nauseous. “Bloody _fucking_ hell.”

Fenris doesn’t answer. He is miles away, looking at the bookbinder scrubbing the blood crusting the flagstones with the same blind stare as Jenkins. His hands are balled into fists by his sides, the cords tight in his neck. Donnic was glad for the company of a friend and the extra pair of hands—Fenris has helped clear the streets of debris and bodies with relentless, indefatigable efficiency since morning—but for the first time Donnic notices the anger spurring his body, boiling just beneath the surface of his skin.

Donnic looks at him, squinting against the colourless light that streams through the clouds. “Everything alright?”

“Yes,” Fenris replies, too fast.

He turns on his heel, making for the nearest pile of debris—an archway that toppled over a market stall, blocking an alley—but Donnic has no strength left to draw from. Not after Jenkins. Not after filling carts upon carts with the bodies of his brothers- and sisters-in-arms, merchants he has been greeting every day for the past Maker knows how many years, mages whose first taste of freedom was a war they couldn’t hope to win.

“I need a break.” He offers Fenris a drink from his water skin, but he shakes his head, sending droplets of sweat onto the slab of marble under him. Donnic shrugs, then drains his lukewarm water in one swig, casting a sidelong glance at his friend. They’ve been at it for hours already, but the elf looks like he might just tear the city apart piece by piece and put it back together if it will keep him busy. “It’s Hawke, right?” Donnic asks without preamble.

Of course it is. Fenris tenses, a muscle quivering in his jaw. His fingers dig into the crumbling edges of the slab, and he flings it aside with a strength belied by his lean, slender frame. “It is nothing,” he says over the crack of stone hitting the street. “Focus on the task at hand.”

“I’m on break, remember?” Donnic replies, trying for levity.

Fenris huffs for sole answer. He kicks a wooden beam out of the way, then sweeps smaller debris away with his foot. _Fair enough_ , Donnic thinks, dropping the subject. He can only guess at the thoughts that must be running through Fenris’s head. Nothing matters more to himself than the simple, ordinary happiness that he and Aveline—beautiful, brave Aveline—have started building together; he’s grateful, pathetically so, for not loving a mage, with all the uncertainty it entails.

Let alone a maleficarum, revealed as such while the city burned.

Donnic himself will never forget it. For one terrible, unending moment, Hawke had hung limp above the Arishok, skewered on his blade. Her blood streamed down the hilt and his arm while he held her aloft like a helpless banner, the triumph of the Qun over the _bas_ city of Kirkwall.

 _It’s over_ , Donnic thought, then. But the air in the Keep changed, thickening, curdling like milk, and the blood started dripping faster, and faster, straggling and snarling together in crimson swirls. Then the Arishok started bleeding too: a lifetime of old wounds and forgotten scars burst open again, while the stench of hot metal and spoiled meat rose in the Keep. Moonlight struck his eyes, then, wide with terror.

The Arishok, dying afraid. Donnic wishes he could say he felt pity at the sight, but when the blood flooding the tiles of the throne room lapped at his feet, there was nothing but grim, petty satisfaction.

He turned to see Fenris take a step back, the expression on his face indescribable.

Then the night crumbled into a confused welter of memories: the remaining Qunari troops shrugging off their commander’s death and walking off as though they had not just set Kirkwall ablaze, while nobles and guards alike wept in relief, the teachings of the Chantry the last thing on their mind now that they owed a mage their lives.

The Knight-Commander glowering, forced to declare Hawke Champion of the city instead of _apostate_.

It seemed a misnomer at the time. The same magic that ended the Arishok’s life brought back Hawke’s, but still purple shadows bruised her eyes; her lips were a shade too pale, the same ashen colour as the rest of her face. Anders can heal the most grievous of wounds, but unless it is taken from someone else, lost blood is lost.

And she had lost so much.

She smiled when her eyes met Fenris’s, a twist of her mouth so bitter mirth might never have touched her lips. “You were right, Fenris. All mages fall to temptation sooner or later. Happy now?”

Something sterner than anger blazed in his eyes; he looked like he was choking on it. “ _Festis bei umo canavarum_ ,” he cursed in answer, the words a snarled mass clawing its way out of his throat. “No, I am not _happy_.”

He turned away from her without waiting for an answer, betrayal chiseled on his face as though in stone.

Fenris’s voice, pitched to a low hiss, shakes him out of the memory. “ _Fasta vass_ ,” he says, crouched over another slab of stone. “I should’ve known Hawke would fall.”

Donnic dabs his forehead on his sleeve, then helps Fenris heave the marble out of the way. Stopping has only made him realise just how deep the fatigue runs: the burning ache in his muscles seeps to the very marrow of his bones, and now his head fills like a pail submerged in water with the memory of screams and the eye-stinging smell of smoke. “At least it stopped the Qunari,” he replies without thinking, panting from the effort.

Wrong answer. Fenris’s eyes snap in his direction, fierce and dangerous. “Oh? You abide blood magic now?”

“ _No_ ,” he retorts, then sighs at the skeptical brow Fenris arches in answer. “I mean—I don’t _know_. But look around yourself,” Donnic continues, sweeping an arm around towards the carts full of dead bodies and the tiles paving the square, rust-coloured with blood. “Just think how much worse it could’ve been.”

Fenris snorts, unmoved. “I’ve seen enough to know that nothing good ever comes out of blood magic. Once that door has been opened, there is no closing it again.” He lifts a splintered beam, tendons and muscles working under the skin of his forearms, and shoves it aside. “I thought she was different. I thought she was _better_ ,” he spits, and beneath the disgust something small and wounded hides between the words, some shred of betrayed hope. “How wrong I was.”

There’s nothing Donnic can say to that, not to someone who was once a slave to the Imperium. Leave the ethics of blood magic to the Circle of Magi; Donnic follows and enforces the law, no more and no less, and finds something close to comfort in the way it leaves precious little to interpretation. Cowardly of him, maybe. A lack of imagination, Varric calls it, but Donnic has never pretended otherwise, nor aspired to more.

But were it not for Hawke, he would have bled to death in a Lowtown alley or under a Qunari spear. When laws no longer meant anything, Hawke saved him—indeed saved them all.

And Hawke might just be her own best defence. “She’s still Hawke, you know,” Donnic tries.

Some of the steel has fallen out of Fenris’s gaze when he raises his face again. “Is she?” A rhetorical question, of course, but if Donnic didn’t know any better he’d think Fenris hoped for an answer. Then his guard is up again, as quick as that. “She’s lost her way.”

 _I’ve already lost you_ , Hawke told Fenris’s back as he stormed out of the throne room, so quietly Donnic can’t be sure Fenris caught it. _What does it matter?_

“And maybe she needs someone to help her find her way back,” Donnic retorts before he can stop himself. “She’d listen to you. She trusts you.” _She loves you_ , he almost says, because that much is obvious, but equally obvious is that it’s the last thing Fenris wants to hear right now. “You want to make sure she doesn’t turn out like those mages you’ve known in Tevinter? Then _make_ sure she doesn’t.”

Fenris looks at him, his eyes impenetrable, and a flush of shame creeps up the back of Donnic’s neck. He’s gone too far—no matter what passed between Hawke and Fenris, he of all people shouldn’t be saddled with the weight of her decision. “Sorry, I overstepped,” Donnic mumbles, running a hand through his damp hair, but Fenris does not seem to hear him. He’s frowning at the ground now, and Donnic opens his mouth again when he sees what he sees: a small hand emerging from the rubble, fingers stained with dirt and blood scratching weakly at the flagstones.

His heart jumps into his mouth. “ _Maker_ ,” he gasps as they heave the topmost piece of debris out of the way together, “there’s a survivor here!”

Guards crowd the heap of rubble, hauling beams and slabs of stone off the bruised body of the Terfels’ youngest daughter. A Circle healer rushes, a spell at her fingertips; someone tips a water skin to the girl’s pale lips, and she sips, her throat working despite her injuries and her exhaustion. She will live, the healer announces. Her mother and father weep at the news, clinging to each other, while the guards slap each other’s shoulders, smiles gracing their lips again for the first time since the Qunari coup.

When Donnic looks for Fenris, a minute, an hour later, the elf is nowhere in sight.

* * *

He knows the brisk pace of Hawke’s footfalls before he even sees her, the confident clink of her boots parting the crowd in the Keep.  


“Guardsman Donnic,” she greets him on her way out of Bran’s office, Fenris at her heel. Days have blurred into weeks since the invasion, a lifetime ago; the colour has returned to her cheeks since she defeated the Arishok, and the spark to her eyes.

Donnic inclines his head in return. “Champion. You look well.”

“Don’t,” Fenris butts in from where he stands at her shoulder, rolling his eyes. “It will go right to her head.”

“Too late for that,” Hawke says, her crystal laugh bouncing off the high-ceilinged vault of the Keep as she heads towards the double doors. Fenris follows, watching, watching her, until the outside light claims them both.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hello on [Tumblr](https://aban-asaara.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
